


Taking Inventory

by SpaceWall



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, But probably not the one you’re expecting, Canon Divergence - Order 66, Dealing With Trauma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mace Windu Lives, Multi, Padmé Amidala Lives, Padmé and Mace Are Bros, Reunions, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26779699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: An early end to Order 66 leaves Mace Windu struggling to protect the remnants of the Jedi Order and the GAR. Fortunately, there’s more people to rely on than he could ever have anticipated. Also, along the way, he falls in love.Trigger and Content warnings in notes. The ‘official’ canon divergence of this fic is that Yoda and Shaak Ti switch who goes to Kashyyyk, but this will never be explained in detail.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Mace Windu, CC-2224 | Cody/Mace Windu, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla, Mace Windu/Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, OMC/OFC, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Mace Windu, Padmé Amidala & Mace Windu, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Plo Koon/CC-3636 | Wolffe
Comments: 59
Kudos: 362





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my apology for making Mace a jerk in other fics. Sorry Windu, you’re actually a decent guy but I needed a jerk for Plot Reasons.
> 
> CW/TW: This work involves implied suicides and in Ch. 2 explicit discussion of past suicidal thoughts, all of this as a direct consequence of Order 66. In this chapter, skip from when Mace says, “Since last night...” to when he says, “Send me the time...” for the most explicit discussion in Ch. 1. 
> 
> Please also be advised that throughout this work trauma and grief is very prevalent, most of it related to 66. If you’re having a tough time, take a break. Go have a drink of water. I promise this ends well but things are rough for a while in there.

Mace Windu started his day by taking inventory of the situation, of his assets and losses. He had two prosthetic arms, newly made and highly functional. He had Anakin Skywalker, locked in the basement of the Jedi Temple, although he thought Skywalker was really just humouring him, since there wasn’t actually anyone guarding him. He could have walked out at any time. In terms of other people who were not notionally prisoners, he had Jocasta Nu, who’d been locked deep in the temple’s most secure archives for the course of the genocide. He had fifty or so younglings between the ages of three and ten. He had Senators Organa and Amidala, and, as of yesterday, Queen Organa as well. 

After the Fall, Organa and Amidala had sort of just… moved in? They hadn’t asked permission. Organa has given up his chance to be Chancellor to do it. The pair of them had come, each holding a baby, and moved into Anakin and Ahsoka’s old quarters. Padmé, pale and exhausted, had taken over coordinating the Temple’s remaining staff of droids and any civilians who had returned. She was organizing the funerals. Bail, in between Senate meetings and usually with at least one baby in his arms, minded the children. Mace had never anticipated their presence, would never have asked for it, and was sure he couldn’t live without them.

That was the sum total of Mace’s assets and allies, even if he was generously counting Skywalker as one or the other, in spite of his fall. The sum total of his problems and losses was far greater. Two hands, flesh, well used but in good condition. A lightsaber that he’d always intended to die before losing, although if he needed to arm himself the temple was littered with abandoned blades. The Chancellor of the Republic and his faith in the institution. Every other Jedi, except for himself, Jocasta, Anakin, and the children. Even if others had survived, the destruction of communications relays that had stopped Palpatine from distributing further orders had prevented them from contacting the temple or knowing it was safe to return. That might take years to repair. And then there was the burden of all those who had lived. The children, who had nobody left to care for them, let alone to train them. All of whom had lost friends and caregivers in the slaughter. Bail was doing a hero’s work looking after them, but he was, in fact, one of the Republic’s most significant Senators and desperately needed elsewhere. 

Then there were the clones, who were equally as traumatized as the children, but numbered in the thousands on Coruscant alone rather than the dozens. They didn’t have one of the Republic’s foremost Senators trying to protect them. Instead, they just had Mace, trying his best to juggle being the entire Jedi order with also being their only remaining General. When communications were reestablished, his problems would only multiply as he tried to take the clones who had survived killing their generals into his care. At least then he would know for certain who had died and how. That would ease some of the pain in his heart, in the force.

Having taken stock of the day’s situation – as bad as usual, with the only change being Queen Organa’s arrival yesterday – Mace cracked his neck and stood to begin his day. 

\--

Padmé was already in the mess hall when he came down, with one of the babies strapped to her chest. The kids were cute, not that he intended to admit to Skywalker as much. There were six children eating around the table with her, mostly older, eight to ten. Mace was still learning their names, but he knew some. Lev, who was Dorin. Zera, who was born on Coruscant. He thought he’d know them all in a week or two. 

Grabbing a bowl of porridge, he sat down with Padmé. 

“Do you ever sleep?” He certainly didn’t feel like he had, and she’d been up, feeding one of the children and keeping an eye on the younglings, when he’d gone to bed. 

Padmé snorted. “Would you believe I’m running on sheer force of will?”

“Having met Anakin? Absolutely.”

Her laugh echoed through the empty room. It could have – should have – sat a hundred people at the least. 

More somberly, she said, “Breha’s going to take over looking for them during the day, at least until I can get word to Naboo. I need to be back in the Senate. I have my vote and Palpatine’s both, right now.” 

“And is there any reason why the Queen of Alderaan has to be your babysitter?”

Padmé looked down at her child. Windu was going to have to figure out their force signatures soon. He couldn’t tell them apart by their faces. 

“Bail asked her to come while I was still in hospital. This is how long it took the message to get to Alderaan.” Of course. “Only diplomatic channels were open, so we couldn’t have contacted anyone else, and…” She lowered her voice, slightly. “I thought I was going to die. It was touch and go for a while there. Palpatine… did something, to me, I think. Revenge against Anakin. If I’d died, I asked Bail to take them.”

But of course she had. Because Mace had their father locked in the basement. “Have you taken them to see him?”

She nodded. “I hope you don’t mind, I just don’t think he should be alone.” 

Anakin didn’t really deserve to be alone. Other than the harm done to Mace himself, and the crimes he’d confessed to later against the Sand People, he hadn’t actually hurt anyone during his fall. Relative to the rest of the temple’s adult population, who had all killed mind controlled clones, or Mace’s allies outside it, who were mind-controlled clones, he was probably in the less-culpable half. Although Anakin insisted he had full agency over everything he’d done, Mace had his doubts. Palpatine had done things, to everyone, and he had more focus on Anakin than on most. Although he had never liked Skywalker, much, there had always been as much light in him as in any of the Jedi, under his anger and loneliness. Enough light that he shouldn’t have fallen so far. Mace wouldn’t have allowed him, otherwise, no matter what Qui-Gon’s dying words had been.

But all that made him think of Obi-Wan, and that hurt far too much. 

With a feeling of slight nausea, Mace set his half-eaten oatmeal down. “I have to go meet Fox. If you felt it was appropriate… it would be acceptable to me for Anakin to provide assistance with caring for your children as well. I don’t believe he would do them any harm, and he can’t do anything else. You and Queen Organa certainly can.”

That won him a smile. “I’ll let Breha know. It couldn’t be for long, but…”

But it would allow them to get to know their father. Padmé might have some time to sleep, Breha Organa would have time to help her husband save the Republic, and Anakin would be able to do something besides sit around feeling miserable. Everyone wins. 

\--

It was a testament to Fox’s strength of character that he’d managed to hold his men together in the aftermath of the Fall, which the troopers were calling Sixty-Six, in hushed tones, as if simply saying the words would summon it back. When Yoda and Skywalker had cut down Palpatine, it hadn’t stopped. It hadn’t stopped until after Yoda died of his wounds on the floor of the Senate and Skywalker – foolish, arrogant, brilliant Skywalker – had done what he did best, and destroyed things. The entirety of the Galaxy’s communication arrays, with a massive burst of the Force and some creative engineering that Mace didn’t fully understand. That had stopped the messages from going out any longer, and the electromagnetic pulse that Anakin had set the relays to perform as they went had fried most of the control chips, along with half of the datapads on Coruscant. When Skywalker broke everything, Mace had discovered, it actually could get worse than crashing a ship into the capital of the Galaxy. On the other hand, though, it had saved the clones, at least here on Coruscant, and it was hard for Mace to complain about those results. Their lives were worth enough to him that the terrible consequences for the Republic’s infrastructure seemed irrelevant. Other men might have disagreed. 

Fox, when the noise in his head had stopped, had done his level best to protect his men from the violence Palpatine had inflicted upon them. He’d been run off his feet even more than Mace, finding any civilian with so much as half a degree in psychology to help offer them counselling. There were so few willing to work with clones, and so many clones, all over the galaxy, who were going to need them. If Mace ever managed to get back in touch with them. For now, though, all he had was Fox, and he was eternally grateful for that much.

“General.” Fox nodded to him. 

“Mace,” he corrected, for what must have been the hundredth time. “No more kriffing Generals.”

“Maybe he’ll do that when he’s dead, General,” Fox’s assistant Catapult interjected. He was a relatively young clone. Two days after the Fall, he’d gone down to the lower levels and dyed his hair neon green. They’d thought he was dead, until he’d slunk back the next morning, suddenly radiant. He’d been one of their best and most reliable helpers ever since.

“Preferably before that.” Mace couldn’t keep a smile on his face to try and bolster them, even if he desperately wanted to. “Since last night, how many…” 

How many more dead.

“Four,” Catapult said. The smile was gone from his face as well. “We’ve found troopers won’t subject each other to any more death. So we paired people up. But we still had some, so we went to groups of four. Then we only had one where all the people agreed.”

Four too many. Four people whose minds and bodies had been stolen by a Sith, who didn’t ask for any of this. Murdered, as much as if Palpatine had slashed their heads off with a lightsaber. 

“Is there anything I can do? When will we be having the funeral services?”

“We’re calling them remembrances, now.” That was better, maybe, with the unyielding torrent of funeral pyres Mace had had to light, for Jedi as young as three and as ancient as… well, however old Yoda had really been when he wasn’t rounding to the nearest century. No more funerals. “And… they’re scheduled for tomorrow. We never used to have time, to sit around and honour our dead, but now we don’t really have anything else.”

They couldn’t have too many troopers in the temple, because the children were terrified of them. The Senate didn’t want them; civilians wanted them even less, except for when they were useful. So now, all they had was their grief and their misplaced guilt.

“Send me the time. I’ll be there. Send me their names, too.” A thought occurred to him. “Is there a list? Of the names, the real names, of every clone?”

“No, Sir,” Fox said, after a moment, which Mace supposed was better than ‘General’.

“Do you have anyone who might be interested in making one? For everyone here, to start with, and all those who are gone. If that gets done, you might requisition the complete list of everyone’s numbers, from the top down, start correcting them, batch by batch. People will remember the names of the people they grew up with, or served with on other assignments.”

They exchanged a look. “I think so,” Catapult said, tentatively, “but what are you going to do with that?”

They were nervous. Of course they were. “Two things. I’m going to make sure nobody ends up buried or memorialized as a number unless they want to be, and I’m going to give it to the Senators. Amidala and Organa. Even if there are species in this Republic that use many things as names that we humans would find incomprehensible, many of us still share a certain prejudice that personhood is derived from ‘humanity’. You have numbers for the same reason droids do. To make it easier not to offer you empathy. I can’t make everyone in the Galaxy care, but we can make it a little harder for them not to do so. No numbers. Anywhere. If that’s something you want.”

The same exchanged look, again. “We’ll ask everyone,” Fox said, “and get back to you. At the very least, we can give you the names of the dead. You’re right that they deserve more than that.”

“Thank you.”

The silence grew awkward, before Catapult clapped his hands and said, “well, we can start with the repairs on the comms array. Three words. Bring. Me. Skywalker. We think we’ve got a single-frequency transmitter and receiver operating, but the frequencies they’re on keep jumping around. Nobody’s going to be able to match our signal long enough to receive anything more complicated than a lifeday greeting.”

It wasn’t the worst idea Mace had ever heard. “I’ll talk to him tonight, get back to you tomorrow. I’ll have to be there to supervise him, but I think it can be done. For today… if I record a five-second looped message, can you play it on every frequency you get?”

People might think it was a trap, but someone might answer. Someone might come home.

And so he recorded it, talking far more quickly than he usually would have. “Sith defeated; Coruscant safe; clones were brainwashed, are innocent; come home.”

“Well,” Fox said, with a grimace, “I suppose those are the salient points.”

They moved on to what Mace had come to think of as The List, today’s tasks, which were mostly a list of names. All the clones who had asked to speak to him. A few who hadn’t asked. A couple who hadn’t spoken since they’d woken up to find their own hands stained with blood. They needed things none of the therapists and back-alley doctors Fox had dragged from the lower-levels could give them. Absolution from a Jedi, someone to help them with one of the Chancellor’s many Force-based wounds. It seemed he’d inflicted strange psychological punishments on his own men either as some sort of practice or amusement. Fox had probably only been spared because with the amount of time he spent with the Chancellor personally, having him be undamaged was actually pertinent. 

They’d reached the fourth person on the list – CT-9221, who wouldn’t speak and was too Shiny to have anyone totally certain of his actual name – when Catapult burst in, grinning so wide his face was about to split open. 

“We got one!” He yelled, and grabbed Nine-Two-Two-One by his hands and spun him around the room in a circle. It was not what Mace would have advised for the traumatized young man, who pulled his hands back to glare at Catapult. 

“Catapult!”

He kept the grin plastered to his face. “Sorry Mace, but the 212th just checked in. We lost their transmission after a couple seconds but they said ‘returning’.”

The morning’s nausea returned, worse than ever. But Catapult’s joy was too pure to ruin. Whatever had allowed this remarkable young man the ability to feel joy, after everything, was sacred, and deserved to be protected at all costs. 

“Thank you for telling me.”

He sombred, for just a second, and leaned over to pat Mace on the shoulder. “Their General… someone you knew?”

Knew. Knew, because nobody else could have survived. If the only ones who had survived in a place as protected as the Temple were an old archivist and children hiding under furniture, then everyone else had to be gone. They didn’t even know if Anakin’s blast had knocked out the clones’ chips on other worlds. For all they knew, the men coming back were coming to kill them. 

“His name was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was…” brilliant, mad, too much of a flirt for his own good, loving, kind. “One of the best Jedi I ever knew.”

“I’m sorry.”

Catapult left them, and, after a moment, Nine-Two-Two-One uncrossed his arms, and folded back into his seat. To fill the silence between them, Mace said, “I’m sorry about him. Well… not sorry, exactly. I’m thrilled he exists. I wish I had a hundred like him. But being in the same room as someone who isn’t showing their hurt in the way you feel it, when it feels like your heart has been torn out… it can be very painful.”

Nine-Two-Two-One raised his hands, and made the standard battlefield sign for ‘copy’. It was the first thing he’d said since the Fall.

When I tell Catapult about this, Mace thought, he’s going to smile so hard he’ll get stuck.

\--

“The 212th are coming back to Coruscant.”

Even though Mace’s back was turned, he could feel Skywalker’s wince. 

“I stopped hearing Palpatine the second I felt them start to die,” he said quietly, after a moment. “It was all so loud. I didn’t even feel Obi-Wan’s. Can you believe that? He gave me a decade of his life and he’s gone and I didn’t even notice. I thought I saw him for a second, like in a dream, but I didn’t feel him die. He was one of the only people in the Galaxy who ever really loved me and I missed it. He deserved better.”

Kriff it, Mace thought, and slammed his right hand into the durasteel wall so hard it dented. Skywalker jumped. “I know! You think I don’t know? I know. It wasn’t enough. You weren’t enough; I wasn’t enough; Yoda, and Kit, and Agen, and Saesee, none of us were enough. Not a single one of us, not all of us together. We failed them, we failed the clones, we failed the whole fucking galaxy!”

He knew the second he closed his mouth that he shouldn’t have done it. Not in front of Skywalker. When he turned around, the boy was double over, head buried in his hands as he sobbed. How old was he? Nine at Qui-Gon’s presentation, thirteen-ish years since? Twenty-two, give or take. Obi-Wan had still been a padawan at that age. Most human Jedi were. And Skywalker would have been a master in truth if Tano had taken their offer. What had the war done to make them heap responsibility on this boy?

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t feel him either, and he was…” Everything. The love of my life. One of my dearest friends.

“You had an excuse. You were plastered to the front of a moving speeder, bleeding out.”

But he’d still felt his bond with Depa break, felt Yoda slip away with shocking grace and dignity.

There was nothing to be gained by going down this path of conversation. They both knew it. Anakin backed down first. “Padmé said you were going to let me watch over the children while she’s busy.”

Right, he’d made two promises of Anakin’s time. “You can. In two days. Catapult, in charge of fixing the comms systems you broke, wants you to come help fix it.”

Anakin’s eyes widened. “You’d let me do that? It’s going to take much longer than two days.”

When didn’t it, with Skywalker and his fool habit of breaking everything. As bad as Obi-Wan losing his lightsaber, or Depa… no, thinking of either of them was a path to madness. Someday, when he had time, he would mourn them properly, grieve and release his sorrows. But not today. Today, he still had need of them. Vaapad had taught him to balance the strength of emotion with the serenity of a Jedi, and at the moment, these losses were his power. They were electricity in his veins, keeping him standing despite the exhaustion, and his wounds, and everything. 

“One day. I don’t have time to supervise you for longer. I’m sure you can understand why letting you go unsupervised would be… ill advised.”

The Anakin of a month ago would have said, petulantly, “but why?” This Anakin said nothing at all. Somehow, it wasn’t as rewarding as Mace had always imagined getting the boy to just shut up for a moment would be. 

Obi-Wan, for reasons known only to himself, had loved this stupid, arrogant, petulant child more than anything in the Galaxy. Mace knew the feeling, when he thought of Depa. Now they were both gone, and only he and Anakin were here. Somehow he thought it would have been a betrayal of both of their memories to let him wither and die.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Mace said, softly and mostly to himself. Anakin just stared, utterly uncomprehending. Feeling the need to be understood, he added, “Obi-Wan would haunt me if I did any different.”

From someone trained by Qui-Gon Jinn, that wasn’t necessarily an idle threat. 

\--

In both a worse and better mood the next morning, at an equally unreasonable hour, Mace Windu enumerated his assets and problems thusly:

Assets: Two functional hands capable of denting a durasteel wall. Two unrepentant Senators. Two unreasonably cute babies. One meddling monarch. One exceptionally repentant Fallen Jedi with good mechanical skills. One competent commander and one cheerful sidekick. One marginally functional transmitter.  
Problems: Everything.

\--

The day after that, when the morning’s list was full of Anakin’s myriad problems with the relay system, the thing he’d been dreading finally happened. It happened while Mace was eating lunch, a meal he rarely had time for.

His comlink buzzed. Ground-ground transmission was most of what was functional, so he knew it was Fox. 

“Here.”

“Sir. The 212th is back. They’re requesting permission to land, and immediate medical assistance.”

Of course they were. “I think it’s best if I’m not there personally, until you can confirm they’re no longer being controlled. Can your medics manage it?”

“No, you don’t understand.” There was a tinge of hysteria in Fox’s voice. “They’re requesting medical assistance for General Kenobi.”

On the other side of the room Bail Organa, who for some obscure reason was in the middle of teaching the initiates how to glue dried noodles to pieces of flimsi, knocked over a box of the stuff in his surprise, and segued into an impromptu session of everyone picking up small objects with the Force. But he was grinning so much like a mad man that he looked more like Catapult than any of his literal clones did.

\--

It took a lot of convincing from all parties to get Cody and Fox into the same room. Neither trusted that the other was no longer being controlled, and were too overprotective of Obi-Wan and Mace to allow them to be in the same room as the other commander. But with a holo of Obi-Wan, apparently comatose, and more audio of Mace, they both became convinced that it was probably safe for their ‘generals’. And so, as if it were an exchange of hostages, they both brought their charges forward, at the same time. Obi-Wan on a stretcher, but very much alive in the Force. He was… dimmed, somehow. He didn’t feel like himself. But there was no question he was alive. 

Mace was rarely demonstrative of his emotions towards others. He had always been keenly aware that he felt things more fiercely than was readily acceptable for a Jedi, and accordingly had become good at disguising that from… well, everyone really, if Skywalker, who had always thought him one of the council’s more conservative members on matters of love and attachment, was to be believed. But he had to press a hand to his mouth to keep himself from sobbing when they finally were an armslength away, standing between the assembled rows of clones. 

To Cody, he said, “you and I should debrief, first. Fox can call ahead, and your men can meet Master Nu to get him settled in the Temple. Is that alright?” Somehow, it felt as if he should put off being alone with Obi-Wan for as long as possible. As if them being alone together would make it cease to be real.

There was a smattering of nods all around. It was going to be very, very useful, he realized, to have a group of troopers around who didn’t associate the temple building with their most severe traumas. 

It was difficult to resist reaching out and touching Obi-Wan as they took him away, but Mace thought it was a testament to the vestiges of his self control that he managed it. 

“General?” Cody was looking at him. “What happened?”

\--

They had the meeting in Fox’s office. Because of all the datapad burnout, almost all his paperwork, which was excessive, was on flimsi, which he was storing in boxes that nearly filled the space. Mace had to shove a few out of the way to even sit down in Fox’s chair. 

“The Chancellor,” Mace said, “was the Sith Master. When we attempted to arrest him, he killed Masters Kolar, Fisto, and Tiin. I then defeated him. Skywalker, who was… conflicted, with the dark side, did this.” He raised his hands in demonstration. “I didn’t witness anything that happened after that, but Skywalker informs me that the Chancellor sent a transmission out to the GAR activating something called ‘Order Sixty-Six’, and ordered Anakin to go to the temple and kill everyone inside. Before he could do so, however, Master Yoda arrived on the scene, and engaged the Sith in a duel. Skywalker began to feel the deaths of the other jedi, and witnessed a few clones attempt to attack Yoda, and realized what, exactly the order entailed. He was furious, attacked the Sith, and together he and Yoda killed him. But when the death in the Force didn’t stop, Skywalker decided to do… something, to all the comms relays in the damn galaxy, which apparently fried the chips – and also most of the datapads, at least here on Coruscant. Then he went to Senator Amidala, who was hospitalized but alive, and she persuaded him to turn himself in, at which point he discovered that the only Jedi left alive on Coruscant, possibly anywhere in the Galaxy, were Master Nu, fifty or so younglings, and myself, at that point in a bacta tank.”

Cody’s eyes were closed, he noticed then. As if he had no energy to shed any more tears. “We received the transmission. It was like… having everything you are scraped out of your bucket with a spoon, sir.”

“Mace.” Cody opened his eyes, briefly. “My name. I’ve had enough of being anyone’s commanding officer for a very long time.”

“Mace,” Cody repeated, and closed his eyes again. “The General was… really kriffing lucky. I’d like to say we saved him, but actually we shot at him, missed, and assumed he’d fallen to his death. It looks like he hit a pool of water, bumped his head on the bottom, nearly drowned, and then, very luckily, washed up on the shore far enough from us that we didn’t find him until after whatever Anakin did.”

Head injury… maybe, it hadn’t felt like one, though. And Skywalker was so certain their bond had been cut. Could the clones even have diagnosed or understood a force-based injury?

“And you saved him. Kept him safe until you got our transmission.” He nodded. “Thank you.”

“I don’t think you need to thank us for Obi-Wan’s sheer dumb luck, s–Mace.”

Close enough. 

“But I do. It would have been very easy for you to leave him, to succumb to grief or confusion, self-loathing or chaos. You didn’t. You stayed together and you brought him home.”

“It was easy to keep them together with him alive. The only people I had to worry about were those who directly shot him. I’ve had them under surveillance.”

Smart man. “Well done, Cody.” Inspiration struck him. “Come with me, to the Temple. We’ll see if we can do something about Obi-Wan’s coma, but we’re going to need help, first.”

It was really very unfortunate that the three – four, now – survivors, contained no natural healers between them. Jocasta was a middling force-wielder, whose skills largely consisted of past-visions and narrative memory. Not helpful. Mace, of course, was more powerful, but his techniques were more focused in the realm of combat, and of course the Shatterpoints. Obi-Wan couldn’t have helped even if he was a healer, since he was the patient. But Skywalker… well, he was no healer, but he was Obi-Wan’s padawan. They were just going to have to hope that was enough.

\--

“Cody.” Anakin bowed his head. 

There was a moment of tension. Mace could just imagine what he was thinking. That if Skywalker had made better choices, none of this would have happened, but also the profound gratitude that Skywalker had stopped it, and the relief that he was alive. 

“He’s alive,” Mace said, saving either of them from saying anything more. “He’s alive, and I need your help.”

He’d never seen eyes so wide as Skywalker’s in that moment. “Alive?” The question was rhetorical. “But I felt?” And that one wasn’t.

“I believe something… happened to his connection to the force. If it were head trauma, the 212th could have done more about it.”

Like Mace had done earlier, Anakin covered his mouth with the back of a hand. He didn’t allow himself to cry, standing up with his other hand pushed against the table. 

“I’ll do whatever I can to help. I swear it.”

\--

They found their resident senators clustered around Obi-Wan’s bed, each holding a baby. Cody stared, bewildered, as Anakin kissed first his wife, and then each of his children on the forehead. 

“Master Nu told us to tell you that she hasn’t got the faintest idea what’s wrong, but she’ll check the records after the initiates are in bed tonight.”

Mace wasn’t going to wait that long. Now that Obi-Wan was here, in front of him, he couldn’t. By the lines of tension in Skywalker’s body, he guessed that he felt the same.

“Senators… if you could give us the room, please.” Cody went to leave with them, but something made Mace reach out to pull him back. It seemed… wrong, to have him not be there. Obi-Wan’s regard for him was well known, and there was no doubt that having been party to Obi-Wan’s injury was weighing on him. He needed to be there to see it healed.

Mace and Skywalker sat together on the floor, and entered meditation. The force around them was bright and dark, in nearly equal measure. They had both felt so much pain, and yet had such enduring hope, in spite of it. Skywalker’s love for his children and his wife seemed not to be bringing him fear, or possessiveness. Instead he felt… calm certainty that they were the goodness in the universe. Passion, yet serenity, Mace thought, the memory of Depa saying those words cutting through him like a lightsaber. For Mace himself, he still had his passionate fury at everything that had happened to him, but also, serenity. Acceptance that it had happened and all he had to do now was decide how he was going to live with it. To forgive Skywalker, to help Fox and Catapult and Cody and all their kin.

Mace wrapped his shields around Skywalker in the force, like swaddling a child. (I’ll hold you, while you go for Obi-Wan.)

Skywalker’s consent was felt as much as heard. He dropped his own shields, allowing Mace to take over, and the scope of him was almost overwhelming. Highest midichlorian count on record, Mace thought. Guess that’s what it means. With surprising gentleness for his character and his power, Skywalker reached over to the dull form of Obi-Wan, robbed of all his strength.

(Show me what happened), he commanded, and the force rose to obey his every wish. 

They were falling, down, and down, and then the crash as they hit solid water. But Obi-Wan wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking, (Anakin), and (our bond) and (Oh Force, everyone is dying). He could feel all of their lives flicker away, one by one. He thought of Qui-Gon, dying, and leaving him alone, and he thought, (not Anakin too), and he reached out in the force and grabbed.

(I thought it was a ghost), Anakin’s mind said. He shared a memory of standing in the Chancellor’s office, and the form of Obi-Wan appearing before him, stretching out a hand, and begging him to stay. Yoda and the Sith were sparring already, and in the memory, some of the red-fury cleared from Anakin’s sight. 

No wonder Obi-Wan had very nearly died. He hadn’t hit his head, he’d nearly given his life up into the Force to save Anakin. He’d probably saved the Galaxy from another Sith empire. 

(You did it,) Anakin assured the fluttering spirit, enfolding it in the brightest and most hopeful parts of himself. (Come home.) 

Anakin’s spirit lessened, a little, but Obi-Wan’s grew warm and steady in between them. Mace thought the boy would have continued, given Obi-Wan everything he had, if Mace hadn’t pulled him away. 

(My turn,) he said.

He thought of Catapult, pulsing with hope and determination in the force. He breathed and centred himself, and gave Obi-Wan a piece of the acceptance he’d found, these last few days. Something terrible and violent had happened. But all time could do was move forward, and they had to carry along with it or be swept under. He took the energy that sustained him, and gave it away. Skywalker caught him, and, together, they returned to themselves. Mace slumped forward, exhausted. 

“Obi-Wan?” Cody’s voice was shaking, but determined. 

Please, Mace thought, though he didn’t believe in any deity who could have helped him. Only the force. Please. 

“Cody?” 

That damn prim Coruscanti accent that Mace adored. The man he loved.

“I’m here, General.” He pushed away from the wall, past Anakin and Mace on the floor, to allow Obi-Wan to grab his hands desperately. 

“Everyone is gone, Cody. Everyone is gone. I felt– all the Jedi. They’re all dead.”

His voice sounded so broken. Cody let go of his hand to stroke his hair. “I know, General. I’m sorry.” 

It seemed somehow an intrusion on their privacy. Anakin, obviously feeling the same, cleared his throat. “Not everyone.” 

Mace, who couldn’t find his words, pulled himself up so he was in Obi-Wan’s line of sight. They watched each other for a long moment until Anakin spoke again. 

“You saved me. You almost died, and you saved me.”

Obi-Wan was crying. Actually, they both were. Mace wondered if Cody felt as much an outsider in this moment as he did.

“It wasn’t worth living if I didn’t try.”

And then Skywalker was holding him, babbling about being a traitor, and a liar, and a killer, and Obi-Wan was patting him awkwardly on the back. He didn’t offer absolution, nor judgement. 

Mace, finally finding his voice, said, “you’re not so bad, Skywalker.”

Obi-Wan glanced between them in confusion. But of course. Last time the three of them had been in a room together, Anakin and Mace had been… enemies, as much as anything. 

“If anyone should know what I am,” Skywalker hissed, “it should be you.”

Maybe. Mace rubbed unconsciously at the seam between metal and flesh. It wasn’t good to irritate it like that, but it was difficult not to. 

“What happened?” Obi-Wan asked, startling both of them out of their reverie. Mace, who abruptly realized he was swaying in place, moved to sit on the edge of Obi-Wan’s bed. He wanted to sleep for a week. 

Cody, Mace, and Skywalker all exchanged silent looks, attempting to pass the burden on. Mace, who had already explained to Cody today, wanted nothing less. But the other two were looking at him, so he steadied himself with a deep breath, and said, “The Chancellor was the Sith. He wanted Skywalker as his next apprentice. Who knows how long he was working on it, undermining Dooku.”

Obi-Wan had gone rigid, so much so that Skywalker pulled back to make sure he was alright. There was a wild desperation on his face. “I left you alone with him.” Skywalker said nothing. He’d never been unwilling to criticize Obi-Wan before, but this was different. “Force, Anakin, I left you alone with him when you were fourteen. Younger, maybe.”

Mace hadn’t known about that. But… the Chancellor always had taken an interest in Skywalker. Had wanted him given certain missions, a seat on the council. How much of that had been an effort to get close to him? How much had been an effort to drive a wedge between him and the rest of the Jedi?

“Anakin, I let him…” Skywalker turned his face away. 

Mace couldn’t absolve him of this guilt. Only Skywalker could do that. But he could say something. “I didn’t notice, either. None of us did. And it wasn’t just Anakin. He had… a control chip, placed in the clones. It allowed him to rob them of their free will, with the speaking of a single activation phrase. It forced them to attack the Jedi.”

It was Cody’s turn, to look sharply away. But this time, Obi-Wan didn’t let it happen. He reached up, and turned his Commander’s face back to him with sabre-calloused fingers. 

“I am so immeasurably sorry.”

“You didn’t do this,” Cody muttered, but he put his hand up to Obi-Wan’s and wove their fingers together. Mace considered whether he ought to feel jealous, and decided that there was a rightness to the pair of them, the gentle way they held each other.

“For what it’s worth,” Skywalker murmured, so faintly Mace almost didn’t hear him, “I don’t blame you either. I think he would want me to blame you, but… he was wrong. He was wrong about you, and about Padmé, and he was a liar, and I’m sick of believing things he wanted me to. He’s the one to blame, for the things he did.”

Obi-Wan looked to Mace, almost desperately, asking for someone to blame him. He had such a desperation to be guilty. To be blamed. And some probably would have blamed him, for Anakin’s falling. But Mace had been on the council that had first refused Anakin training, that had later allowed a knight so newly minted that you could still smell his braid burning to take him on. They could have helped. Any of them could have helped, and none of them had. Now, only Mace and Jocasta were here to live with it, and correct the mistake they’d made with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and Anakin so long ago.

As the beginning of fixing this, Mace said, “don’t look at me like that. You’re a good man, Obi-Wan Kenobi. And we need you now, rather desperately.” He forced himself to stand, swaying slightly on his feet. “Get some rest. Skywalker… oh, force take it all. See yourself back to your cell or don’t. I couldn’t care less. Cody… you’re more than welcome to stay, but do try and stay out of the way of the children. They won’t know that you weren’t here then.”

His face and Obi-Wan’s both paled as they realized Mace’s implication.

\--

With the exhaustion of the last few tendays and the entire war combined with the effort of healing Obi-Wan, Mace managed to sleep through his alarm. Instead, he woke around noon and stumbled out of bed to discover a hastily scribbled note on the hall table from Padmé.

 _Jocasta meeting with Catapult today, supervising Anakin on repairs. Cody and Fox integrating 212th. Bail and I meeting with the Senate. Mon Mothma probably going to win chancellery. Breha supervising younglings. Obi-Wan with L &L. They adore him, naturally. _

_About time you got some sleep!_

_Padmé._

Assets, he thought. She’d already listed all the important ones. Problems: a few less than yesterday. 

\--

There was always work to do, but Mace would have been remiss in trying to do any of it without first going to see for himself the scene Padmé had tantelized him with in her letter. He let himself into Obi-Wan’s room with his council codes, and was delighted to see Obi-Wan, lying flat on his back on the couch with two babies on his chest. It was, quite possibly, the most precious thing he’d ever seen. 

“I ought to take a picture.”

Obi-Wan gave him a glare that said exactly what would happen to him if he did. Then the expression softened, slightly. He whispered, “don’t wake them. Come closer.”

Most Jedi walked softly, and Mace, even in his heavy boots, made little noise as he crossed to kneel beside Obi-Wan’s head. It was just as cute up close.

“I didn’t have much time to speak with you, yesterday. You left me with Cody and Anakin.”

“I thought you would want to be with them.”

Obi-Wan gave him an odd look, as best he could when unable to do much more than turn his neck. “Of course I did. And I wanted to be with you.”

Oh. It took Mace a moment to find something, anything, to say to that. Finally, he settled on the words he’d been holding onto since that first moment Obi-Wan had returned to him. 

“I thought you were dead. I thought I lost you.”

“Give me your hand.”

One of Obi-Wan’s arms was dedicated to holding the baby Mace thought was Luke against him. The other was mostly pinned under probably-Leia, but with a little maneuvering, Obi-Wan managed to free it, and to clasp Mace’s metal fingers in his own. 

“How much can you feel?”

Mace hadn’t had time to be sedated for the nervous surgery to increase the sensitivity in his hands. “Some. It’s all a bit… muffled.”

Obi-Wan raised it to his mouth, and pressed a kiss to the metal fingertips. Mace’s breath caught in his throat. 

Lips moving against his fingers, the faint tickling sensation of them tracing through Mace’s veins until his heart stuttered, Obi-Wan said, “I am here, and I am alive. You are alive. I don’t know how much we’ve lost, and I know it’s far too much, but I know that I am glad you are here with me, and I am glad to be here with you. I think… depending on if and what we hear from Ahsoka… I am prepared to declare myself the luckiest man in the galaxy. I have Anakin, and Cody. And you.”

Mace, who could feel Depa’s absence like she’d been carved out of him with a knife, more devastating than the loss of his own hands, could not say the same. 

“I think,” he said, “that we’ve been dancing around this for a very, very long time.”

How long? The first year of the war, maybe, when Obi-Wan had become a Master, and joined the Council, and become The Negotiator, and Mace had seen him rise glorious and felt… well, something. Or earlier? Those last couple of years before Geonosis, when Obi-Wan and Skywalker were off on missions every other week, and Skywalker was finally growing into a truly excellent Jedi, and Obi-Wan had passed Mace in the halls and smiled at him. There had been so much to say. Why hadn’t he ever said anything?

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “But we’re here now.”

There was that. Mace wanted so badly to give in. “I don’t think I can, right now. Everything is just so… empty, and there are so many people who need me, and Depa is gone, and I can’t bear the thought of losing you because I wrecked this.”

Obi-Wan nodded, but didn’t let go of Mace’s hand. “I’ll be here. However long you need. There isn’t anyone else.”

Now that was patently untrue. “But what about Cody?”

“I wouldn’t do that to you.” Obi-Wan’s eyes had gone wide, and he finally released Mace’s hand. 

Perhaps it was better that he and Cody weren’t together, given how painful it had already been for Cody to see his friend nearly die. But it was certainly something of a surprise. “I thought the two of you were together. The way he looks at you. The way you look at him. It was… nice.”

Obi-Wan, apparently holding on to several trains of thought at once and losing control of all of them, said, “I’m not – we weren’t – you don’t mind? – he’s very…”

Fortunately, after knowing Obi-Wan for most of his life, Mace had learned to speak his language. A little mind reading also didn’t hurt. “You’re attracted to him, but you haven’t ever said anything, possibly because of your work relationship, or because you didn’t feel he would have been free to decline. You felt you could only have one of us, and you chose me – for which I’m grateful, by the way – but I think you’re wrong. You don’t have to choose. I’m fairly certain we wouldn’t even be the only adults under this roof with that particular arrangement.”

He didn’t know who, exactly, of the Skywalker-Amidala-Organa cohort was sleeping with who, and he certainly was not planning on asking. In fact, he was happier not knowing.

“You can’t mean that.”

Which bit? “Because I’m not jealous? Of course not, Obi-Wan. Cody is a good man, and he obviously adores you, which seems like a ringing endorsement in my mind.”

Obi-Wan was blushing. And still holding two babies. Mace definitely should have taken a picture earlier. 

“You’re a better man than I deserve.”

“There’s no such thing as deserve,” Mace told him. “And I’m sorry that I can’t, right now. I promise, when everything is a little less…” Well, everything. “I’ll come to you. And I certainly don’t mind if you and Cody have whatever you have. Just… tell me if he minds whatever we have.”

Obi-Wan gave him a smile that made his heart beat right out of his chest. “You really are the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”

Mace smiled back at him, and stood. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, letting some modicum of the joy he felt at Obi-Wan’s returning his affections fill his words. “You know Padmé. But I’ll happily settle for second place.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mace works to rebuild the Jedi, Cody finds himself in the Galactic Senate, Obi-Wan helps out, and some familiar faces find their ways home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW/CW: suicide. To skip mentions of offscreen unnamed suicides, skip the paragraph starting with “After the miracle of the 212th”. To skip mention of past suicidal thoughts (not acted upon) skip the paragraph starting with '“Well,” Catapult said.’ General grief/mourning throughout. To skip the most explicit references to trauma manifesting as anger, skip the two paragraphs from “Do you ever just want to destroy something?”. To skip the most explicit discussion of survivor’s guilt, skip from the paragraph beginning “Do you hate me...” to the paragraph beginning “Obi-Wan was silent..."

Things got… not better, exactly, but more manageable. With Obi-Wan here, and Anakin’s resulting good mood, it was rather more like having four Jedi around the temple when before it had been like having two. Since Anakin’s consular status had never technically been revoked, even if its delivery had been exceedingly dubious, they took two votes. The first restored Jocasta to the Council, a position she hadn’t occupied in years. The second returned the title of Master of the Order to Mace, with no contention. None of the others were willing to go anywhere near it. With their support, and Padmé at his shoulder, he finally was able to go to the Senate, to explain everything, and to get assistance funds approved for the clones and the Order. 

Having the 212th also made things easier. Fox finally looked like he’d gotten a night’s sleep, for one thing. They had medics, and supplies, and people who were well enough to use them. And Cody on his own was a blessing. He spent time around the Temple, which none of his brothers were willing to do. A few of the younglings who’d been less afraid, had seen little or none of the violence, were able to meet him in civilian clothes, and weren’t afraid at all. Like Obi-Wan with the young Skywalker-Naberrie(-Organa?) children, there was something inescapably wonderful about seeing Cody kneeling down and talking to three five-year-olds. And he was a very good leader. In some ways it came more naturally to him than to Fox, who did so out of necessity. When the Clones were told to elect a representative to the Senate from among themselves, it was no surprise who they chose.

\--

“Did Organa and Amidala help you with your introductory speech?” 

Cody, who was reading over his notes on a sheet of flimsi, looked up at him. They’d been left alone in a back room until such a time as the Senate agenda got around to introducing the new representatives, ie them. 

“Actually, Breha did.” 

She certainly had enough experience. “Well, Representative Cody, what is your first priority?”

Cody, seemingly understanding that this was help practicing for the question period, straightened in his seat. In spite of the nice forest green vest and black slacks someone had found for him, his military bearing was obvious. 

“My first priority came to me as a suggestion from my associate Commander Fox. He and his men have been working on a list of the proper names of all troopers. I believe that the first step to our existence as an independent people has to be delivering to each of us our own legal identities.”

In what he thought was a decent impression of Chancellor Palpatine, Mace said, “ah, but how can we establish distinct legal identities for a group of people who are all… identical.”

He’d had no idea how the joke would go over, but Cody snorted before answering. “Well, the existence of genetically identical individuals is documented in hundreds of species across the Republic, including humans. None of these species are required to share identities with their genetic counterparts. Like identical twins, we Vode are usually easily differentiated by people who know us. Our experiences shape us, and we often grow less physically similar over time. Like other species and cultures, such as Mirialans, we also often choose physical modifications as a form of personal identification. In addition, there are ways in which we were never identical. Some variation was permitted by the Kaminoans, others were not visible to them. Some of us have distinct hair colours, or other surface-level physical differences. Others were born with significant physical differences, including disabilities, although these were usually murdered. We have distinct sexualities and genders, which the Kaminoans either failed to notice or didn’t care about. We are our own people, from the moments of our decanting until our deaths. We aren’t born, but not since the darkest ages of the galaxy’s history was the act of birth what made a person. We are people, not in spite of the ways that we are different from you, but because of them. We are different from the Coruscanti, from Pantorans and Kiffar and Alderaanians. This difference is what makes the Republic. To deny us ourselves simply because our history and our culture our different from yours would be to betray her most sincerely held ideals.”

He paused. Mace gave him a round of applause, hoping he couldn’t be heard from the Senate chamber. 

Cody beamed. “It was good?”

“It was brilliant. You were brilliant. Did you practice questions with Breha as well?”

“No,” he admitted, “that was Obi-Wan.”

Of course it was. Negotiator. “Well, he may be a good teacher, but you’ve got something even Obi-Wan can’t teach. Talent.”

Cody looked down, obviously unfamiliar with such blatant flattery. “You think so?”

“How many of your brothers could stand up there and do that?”

“How many of my brothers had Obi-Wan to help them?” Cody countered.

“Well, Anakin had him for a decade, and he has Padmé, and I can’t imagine him being as singularly compelling as you just were. I may not be the person you have to convince, but I cannot imagine anybody not being convinced by you.”

It was true, every word of it. It was also one of the more flirtatious things Mace had ever said to a person. Well, Cody had spent enough time with Obi-Wan to be used to that sort of thing.

\--

After the miracle of the 212th, almost everyone who managed to contact them carried bad news. Aayla Secura was gone, and the 327th had been left leaderless by a rash of suicides. With an increasingly stable set of frequencies – as good as Anakin said he could make them, without leaving Coruscant to fix relays across the galaxy – Cody and Obi-Wan had persuaded those who remained to come home. Ki-Adi-Mundi’s death had been much the same, except that his troopers had been killed by their enemy directly. Those who remained had stubbornly refused to abandon their campaign, and no pleading from anyone could change their minds. There followed three or four variants on the same before their next story that could be construed as any sort of good news at all, and it was certainly bitter-sweet. 

If Mace had been told, months ago, that all the clones were going to be forced to betray their Jedi, and had then been asked which clones would have taken that most badly, he would quite confidently have named Plo’s 104th as the most likely to fall apart. And yet, in spite of Plo’s death at their hands, they had held together. 

“He wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Wolffe had said, quite simply, and nobody had really found any cause to disagree with him. It was, after all, the sort of man that Plo Koon had been. 

“Would I be completely mad,” Mace asked Jocasta and Obi-Wan, in the next council meeting, “if I were to ask Wolffe to take charge of the remainder of the GAR, and then to rename Fox’s position into some sort of civilian command? Veterans’ Assistance?”

“No,” she said, after a moment, “but he would be completely mad to take the job.”

Fortunately for Mace, Wolffe was just mad enough to agree to do it. There was something broken in him, but, of course, there was something broken in all of them. A litany of names that none of them were willing to speak, because it always felt like comparing wounds. As Wolffe, Cody and Obi-Wan sat in his living room with him, Mace named them in his head. 

Qui-Gon Jinn. Plo Koon. Ahsoka Tano. Satine Kryze. Yoda. Siri Tachi. Jango Fett. Depa Billiba. Bant Eerin. Ponds. And then there were the men of the 104th and the 212th, and Mace didn’t even know the names of the dead. So many gone, over the years of the war and here in the aftermath.

“This is nice,” Wolffe said that evening, gesturing between Cody and Obi-Wan, who sat together on a couch. “I’m happy for you, vod.”

It answered what Mace supposed had always been his question about Plo Koon, but didn’t really make him feel any better. Especially the defiant glance Wolffe gave him, after he said it. That made everything feel worse. He’d known by implication, from the elaborate lies Skywalker and Amidala had concocted, that at least some of the Order had believed the Council – his council, his legacy – would have looked unfavourably upon them for falling in love. It hurt more to know that Plo had believed it than it did to know the same of Anakin. Skywalker had been a boy, deceived by a Sith. Plo had been a friend. If he had not trusted Mace, it was because Mace had acted in such a way as to undermine that trust. 

“I’m sorry,” Mace said, feeling his throat grow tight, “that you ever believed this was something you had to hide.”

Wolffe, looking firmly at the ground, said, “when the war ended… we were going to get married.”

They were all silent for a while at that. Mace knew that Obi-Wan, likely, was just as devoured by guilt over it as he was. 

Cody, quiet and sure, said, “did you swear an oath?” Wolffe bowed his head. “In that case, by Mandalorian law, you were already wed.”

With all the research Cody and his assistants had been doing on the Personhood Act, Mace didn’t even have to question why he knew that. Obi-Wan, who had once fallen in love with the Duchess of Mandalore, said, “actually, that’s true. On Mandalore, it’s the oath that’s important, not the state or any religion. You don’t even need witnesses. Especially under the old laws, where having fought together, won battles together, defended each other, was a key part in any marriage. It was a bond of trust between warriors.”

“Oh,” Wolffe said, and was quiet for a long time. 

\--

After their long run of sorrow and bad news, there was a rush of sudden and wonderful hope. It had been six months since the end of the war, and Skywalker and Obi-Wan had left on a tour of the nearest communications systems, to see about getting things back online. 

Nobody was quite sure if the Republic still existed, since some of the Senators had been unable to have significant contact with their home sectors for months. They’d sent messages back and forth through hyperspace, but the delays were worse than ever, on account of a sudden and dramatic increase in piracy. The further out Senators were from, the worse it was, so while Bail Organa could get a ship in from Alderaan every couple of days, Padmé had only received a dozen from Naboo in half a year, and three of them had been visits from her immediate family to see the twins. At the moment, her parents were there, and the Organas still hadn’t left, making for a surprisingly crowded temple in spite of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s absence. 

That was when the Miracle came to them. “Mace,” Wolffe said, after he’d answered his comlink. He’d been in the middle of training with some of the older initiates. He was keenly aware that they were going to need to make arrangements for some of them to be inducted as Padawans, even if there were not enough Jedi to train them. And soon. 

“Can it wait half an hour?”

“No. We’ll lose the connection then. I’m having Clover re-route the call directly to you. You’ll want to hear this for yourself.”

Leaving the children for a moment, with strict orders to touch nothing, he stepped into the hallway as the call came through. It was a distinctly fuzzy holo of a wookie. 

“I assume you’re calling to inform me of the deaths of some of my associates?”

[No], the Chieftain said, [not that I know of, at least. Last I saw them, Masters Unduli, Ti, and Vos were all alive, and on their way to Kamino. Something about seeing justice done?]

It was hard to feel any pity for the Kaminoans, after what they’d done. Since Shaak’s padawan had been here in the temple, among the dead, while Barriss Offee had been shot in her cell and Aayla Secura shot in the back, Mace was willing to bet the fury that reigned down upon the architects of their murders would be terrible indeed. He knew what it was to lose your padawan, and knew how powerful all three of these survivors were. He only hoped that Vos was holding on to the light. Well, he trusted Shaak and Luminara to see it done.

“If you hear from them, will you tell them that myself, Masters Kenobi and Nu, and Knight Skywalker are alive and on Coruscant?”

With those arrangements made, he went to tell everyone else the brilliant, wonderful news that their numbers had nearly doubled in a single day.

\--

That evening, he found he couldn’t sleep. The joy and adrenaline that coursed through his veins made it almost impossible, but equally, they sickened him. His heart beat too fast, and his mind ran through a thousand scenarios that had never happened. Those who had gone to Kashyyyk had survived. If he had allowed Shaak to bring her Padawan, would the boy have lived? What if Shaak and Yoda hadn’t changed places, at the last moment? Might she have done better here on Coruscant than the ancient master had? Or would she have been defeated too quickly for Skywalker to find his courage? What if they hadn’t imprisoned Barriss Offee? She had died without even the chance to defend herself. What if Shaak had stayed on Kamino to the end of the war? Might she have noticed something? Figured it out?

Cody found him, in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. They sat together on a bench, two insomniacs. They were rarely alone together. 

Cody said, “whenever I can’t sleep, these days, I get stuck on the idea that I’m going to kill you, some day. I can’t see how it won’t happen. Even though I know it’s broken, it’s still inside of me, somehow. Anakin destroyed it with just the right signal. Could somebody fix it with one?”

“Have you looked into having them surgically removed?”

“Maybe a Jedi Healer could have done it, or one of the Kaminoans, but it’s not like we have any of those around. Civilians don’t really want to work on clones, and I wouldn’t trust a droid to do it. Brains are complicated.”

If that wasn’t the understatement of the millenium. “Someday.”

Cody leaned in to him, just slightly, their shoulders brushing together. “Who knows if I’ll live long enough for any of your little maybe-healers to grow up.”

He’d meant whatever the Terrible Three were doing on Kamino, but that reminded him of something far worse he could only hope they would find a solution for. “Force, but the accelerated aging. I’m sorry, Cody.”

“Don’t be. You didn’t do anything. You’re as bad as Obi-Wan sometimes, you know. Neither of you can accept that sometimes terrible things just happen to the people you love, for no reason at all.”

“I was supposed to protect–”

Cody kissed him. There was nothing demanding about it, and his hands on Mace’s robes were loose enough to let him pull away. But he didn’t want to. 

“We love you,” he said after, words soft against Mace’s lips. “You don’t have to say anything back. But you should know how completely, how deeply you are loved.”

Obi-Wan had loved him before, before the world shattered into a thousand fractals around them. It meant something very different to know that Cody had come to love him, even after everything. 

“Thank you.”

Cody kissed him again, just a little deeper, with promise of more to come. “I know you told Obi-Wan you wanted to wait, but… don’t deny yourself happiness just because you feel as though nothing should be happy any more. You wouldn’t ask any of the others to do the same.”

He wasn’t wrong, of course. Mace let himself pull closer, bury his face in Cody’s shoulder. He laughed, gently. “Obi-Wan is going to be very happy about this. He was worried about leaving us alone.”

Three days later, when Obi-Wan got home from repairing the last of the nearby transmitters, he found Mace and Cody both asleep in his bed. The look on his face was something to be savoured for years. 

\--

The Republic seemed to have survived, for the most part. With communications largely repaired, that much was evident. Things picked up, and continued on their usual way. Jocasta went out as a searcher, and brought in a young Togruta – four or so – who Anakin couldn’t even look at without tearing up. They received word from Kamino, finally, and a number of pieces of good news at once: that the Order 66 programming would only activate for Palpatine, who was dead, that the accelerated aging was reversible, with a pre-set course of treatment, that the younger clones were going to be alright. Shaak stayed there to see it done. Quinlan and Luminara returned to Coruscant. Their council now numbered seven. Eeth Koth, who had left the order before the end of the war, got back in touch to say that he was under no circumstance returning to the Order, as he’d found religion, but was happy to assist them, if needed. They had received much the same offer from the Guardians of the Whills, who now, for the first time in the history of the galaxy, were the largest extant order of Force practitioners or disciples. 

Mace had stopped taking inventory of his problems. He found it almost never helped. Instead, in the mornings, while Obi-Wan grumbled over the alarm and Cody picked a suit out for that day’s work in the Senate, he considered his assets, and decided they were far more numerous that he could ever have imagined. 

“Has it occurred to you,” Padmé said that morning, “that there might be more Jedi out there who are hiding because they don’t trust any of this?” Eating together had become their usual habit. They two and Cody were by far the Temple’s most dedicated early risers, so they shared the morning’s duties, as well. Anakin and Obi-Wan took the next shift, and then the Organas and Jocasta. Vos and Luminara, who were both dedicated to not sleeping in the opposite direction, always finished up at night.

It was something that Mace thought of every day. He was certain, in fact, that it was true. The Force told him as much. 

“I don’t know how I could ever convince them otherwise. From their perspective… the living are far more likely to be responsible for what happened to them than the dead.” 

Padmé nodded in understanding, and went back to her eggs. 

—

Half an hour later, Mace was standing outside the Jedi temple with a blaster to his head. The person holding it was hidden in the Force in a way that only a Jedi or a Sith could have effected.

“I think,” he said, to nobody in particular, “that we ought to test Padmé’s midichlorian count. I wonder if carrying Skywalker’s children could have increased it.” 

The blaster pressed harder into his skull. “Shut up.” 

It was a clone in the armour, he thought, though the voice modulation made it even harder than usual to tell who. The armour itself was interesting. Genuine Mandalorian, it looked like. Probably meant to disguise him as a bounty hunter. His associate, who stood off to the side toying with a blaster, was tall and robed so their face was hidden. Humanoid, he thought, but not human. Not with the way that hood draped. Even though their life force was hidden, Mace could feel the cracks of a small shatterpoint near their heart.

“I think,” they said, voice disguised as his was, “that you have a lot of explaining to do.”

Mace felt, rather than saw, the arrival of a fourth person in the force. His heart twisted. “Go back inside, Cody.”

His partner was unarmed, not dressed for this. He had no armour, no force to protect him. For the first time in many weeks, Mace’s fingers itched to grasp the lightsaber he had lost. Since his fight with Palpatine, there had been no need for him to raise a blade, and he had not wanted to wield one belonging to one of his dead friends unless there were no other choice.

“Don’t move,” the Clone hissed, and from the buzz, his associate had armed their blaster and was pointing it at Cody.

(Obi-Wan,) Mace reached out to him in the force. (Outside. Two people with blasters. Cody here, unarmed. Help much appreciated.) 

“I’ll explain whatever you want,” he told them, plainly. “Just… let him go. He’s done no harm to anyone.”

“If that’s true,” the other clone said, softly, “then it only leaves me with more questions.”

Mace wondered if this clone had killed his Jedi. Quite possible. That would leave anyone upset, lonely. But in that case, who was the associate? They must have been the one shielding the pair in the force. No, it made more sense if he’d tried and failed, and the Jedi, whoever was wearing the cloak, had survived and come to the conclusion that the betrayal had come from the Temple.

“I’ve done plenty of harm,” Cody said, quietly, “but not all of it was by choice, vod’ika.” 

It was a solid guess, to act so familiarly. The other clone flinched. Mace said, “he’s been in the Senate, every day, fighting for you. Him, and Fox, and Wolffe. All of them have been fighting to fix this. They’ve come home to us. No matter what they’ve done.” 

“Wolffe wouldn’t,” the possible-Jedi whispered. 

“I didn’t think Cody would have, either.” 

“You said they didn’t have any control, didn’t you?” 

“And I said that had stopped.” 

“And if it had, Wolffe wouldn’t-“

The steady hum of a lightsaber cut through their arguing, as Obi-Wan stepped from the temple, between Cody and their attackers. 

“Wolffe,” Obi-Wan said, quietly, “would never forgive anyone who hurt Plo. But we didn’t, and even the men who killed him didn’t do it by choice. That was all of Darth Sidious’s making.”

“The Sith Master?” 

“It was the Chancellor,” Obi-Wan said, and stepped up to them, placing a hand on the barrel of their blaster. The other Jedi’s resolve seemed to weaken. They didn’t shoot him, even as Obi-Wan came close enough to look under their hood. “He planned everything. Destroyed everything. We survived by chance and fate, not by our own complicity. We never would have done that to the vode. They deserved so much better than that from us. I promise, Ahsoka.”

Of course it was. Her blaster clattered to the ground as Obi-Wan swept her into a tight hug. Ignoring the blaster at his temple, Mace reached down to his comlink, and punched in a now-familiar Ident.

“Skywalker,” he said, “please come to the front of the temple and get your damn padawan.”

The burst of joy from Skywalker was so strong that Mace could feel it from here.

—

“Do you hate me, for the fact that I didn’t lose anyone?” 

“I think, technically, you were the first person to lose someone in this war.” 

Obi-Wan’s head was tucked into his shoulder. Cody, who slept between Obi-Wan and the wall, shifted in his sleep. 

“It’s not the same thing.” 

It wasn’t, of course. The degree to which Anakin and Obi-Wan had escaped the destruction was remarkable. Their padawans were alive. Their partners were alive. Their troopers were, for the most part, alive. But it wasn’t fair to say they were unscathed either. Anakin, though he hadn’t been close to many Jedi, had been a victim of Palpatine’s assaults upon his mind for years. Obi-Wan, for his part, had grown up in the temple. He’d known hundreds of Jedi, at least peripherally.

“Very well, then. The only home you have ever known has been emptied of life. Many of your earliest friends are gone. Your partners were mutilated and violated. Your padawan was tormented and manipulated. Is that enough for you?” 

He sighed, slightly. “It feels… wrong. Unfair to you.”

Mace reached up a hand to stroke the hair just above his ear. “Think of it this way. Could you imagine wanting me to experience something painful that happened to you? Losing my master as a padawan, say. Could you imagine wishing that had happened to me, just because it isn’t fair that it happened to you?” 

Obi-Wan drew in a sharp breath, and in the force, Mace felt his presence reach over to gently envelop his own. It was a protective gesture. 

“No, I can’t.” 

“So, you see, I am profoundly glad for your happiness. I do sometimes feel… that it should not have happened to me, not to Depa. But then I think about the fact that Yoda is dead, and I am alive. That so many Jedi better than me are dead, and I am alive. Sometimes I feel the way you do. But… don’t feel it on my account. I would rather you had every conceivable happiness.” Trying his best not to give the words the significance he felt they held, Mace added, “because I love you.”

Obi-Wan was silent, and his breath was so steady that Mace thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep. It was mortifying, to think he’d said he loved him for the first time since they started dating, and Obi-Wan hadn’t even stayed awake for it. It wasn’t easy for either of them, to fall in love. To be a Jedi and to love – unless you were Anakin, falling completely and instantly, head-over-heels – was a difficult thing. You were taught from an early age not to become attached, and although there were ways to love without being attached, so few Jedi did it that it was difficult if not impossible to learn by the example of others. Mace thought he could number on one hand those he knew who had managed it. Masters T’ra Saa and Tholme, one definitively dead, the other presumably gone as well, now, although Mace retained a certain hope for Master Saa founded on her ancient intellect. Her death was almost as unimaginable as Yoda’s. She’d been a good friend to his own Master Myr, and would have taken him as a Padawan had she not been beaten to the task. Ki-Adi-Mundi, definitely dead. Plo Koon, definitely dead and his love life only revealed posthumously. Not even one hand, perhaps, though if there had been more, Mace would never know their stories now.

“I love you too.” Obi-Wan’s words were as soft as the fingers of a ghost upon his neck. Mace shuddered at their touch. 

“You didn’t have to say anything.” Mace had known, after all, but it still mattered, filling his heart with joy and wonder.

“I know.”

There wasn’t anything for it but to kiss him, really.

\--

The day after what was called, in its final draft, the Clone (Vode) Personhood Act, passed, Mace and his partners were woken in the middle of the night by his priority comlink going off. It was the number that he’d given to Fox, Obi-Wan, Cody, and Wolffe, for emergencies only. But as they all blinked awake and Mace thumbed the answer button, the room filled with the decidedly non-emergency sound of club music. 

“What the fuck?” He demanded.

It was Catapult’s voice that came to him, because of course it was. “Mace! You have to hurry. I’m getting married.”

“I hate him,” Cody muttered darkly. 

“Why are you calling me on an emergency number for this?”

“Because it’s a marriage emergency, obviously! If I want to wake up anyone else, I need to wake four vode at once. I’d ask my roommates, but I changed the assignments to say my roommates were Wolffe, Fox, and Cody ages ago, and only Wolffe ever actually sleeps there.”

Well, Cody was accounted for. Mace wondered what Fox was always doing at this hour. 

“So go wake Wolffe.”

“I need two witnesses.”

Of course he did. “Could it not have waited for a more pleasant hour?” 

“Well, blame the Senate. I just got my Identity Card fifteen minutes ago, and I’m getting married right now. Hurry up, before I have to pull random strangers in off the street or get droids to do it. You should meet my fiancée!” 

He hung up, although the comlink buzzed again seconds later with an address somewhere in the lower levels.

“I am filled with hate,” Cody mumbled. Obi-Wan kissed him on the forehead, and looked to Mace.

“I’ll be the other witness, if you want.”

“Well, I suppose whoever would agree to marry _that_ might be in need of a Jedi’s assistance.”

Obi-Wan laughed. Cody groaned, and sat up. “I can’t miss the first legal clone wedding, can I?”

He was their representative. “I suppose not. By the way, if you get the paperwork through, I can get Wolffe widower’s benefits. That’ll steal Catapult’s record from him, but I think for the best.”

“Mm.” Cody kissed him. “You know I love it when you talk fiscal compensation paperwork to me.”

—

As it turned out, Catapult’s fiancé was a totally normal person. She was a Zabrak civilian, with black skin and horns, and a tail of purple hair tied up at the back of her head. She was also, amusingly enough, a hairdresser.

“We met the day after Sixty-Six,” Catapult explained, half-hanging from her arm as befit their mutual drunkenness. “I went into her salon and it was love at first dye!”

His hair, currently, was an explosion of colours, shades of red and orange like a bonfire. It matched her red dress. 

“How did you end up in a hair salon the day after Sixty-Six?” Cody asked. He’d tried to fix his hair, but now that it was longer, it got curly if he didn’t pay it enough mind in the mornings.

“Tynok and Jabril,” called the clerk, and a couple of humans, as drunk as their own pair, meandered up to the counter.

“Well,” Catapult said, rather unperturbed, “I was going to commit suicide, but I didn’t want any of the vode to find my body. So I went down to the lower levels, and then I just sort of… didn’t. So I got a bunch of tattoos and dyed my hair and fell in love and the rest is history.”

There wasn’t really anything to say about that. The Zabrak seemed to grasp him more tightly and stuck her other hand out to Cody. “Vryka Elaan. It’s an honour to meet you. You’re the reason we’re able to do this today, right?”

Cody shook her hand, but didn’t seem to know what to do with the compliment. Obi-Wan said for him, “yes, he is.”

—

As it resolved, by the time all Catapult and Vryka’s paperwork had been dealt with it was six in the morning, and Fox and Nine-Two-Two-One, who was now going by Duke, had been roused. Apparently, there was an odd number of clones on Coruscant, meaning there had to be either four and one or two and three, so Fox had changed the roster to bunk him and Duke together. He’d assumed, incorrectly, that either Catapult or Cody would be with Wolffe. Four of Vryka’s coworkers had also been summoned, to comprise her half of the party. 

It was one of the oddest weddings Coruscant had ever seen. The happy couple were the world’s most exuberant clone and a hairdresser who looked like she could deadlift him. The wedding party consisted of two Jedi, three identical copies of the groom, and four perfectly normal civilians, three Zabrak and one immigrant from Ryloth who remembered the liberation of her world by clones with great fondness. How she’d ended up working in a Zabrak hair salon, Mace didn’t ask, but she was extremely friendly to Catapult and his siblings, and he was grateful for that.

By the time the documents were signed, the new Elaan couple were nearly sober, and making eyes at each other like they wanted to be somewhere private as soon as possible. As presents, they were given a key to a hotel room by Vryka’s coworkers, one of whom was also her roommate, a pair of placeholder wedding rings made from twisted wires, courtesy of Duke, and a remarkably official looking certificate signed by Fox and Cody recognizing their position as the first legal clone marriage, which made Catapult laugh and grin at both of them. Mace, for his part, felt his time, and his dragging Cody out of bed, had been contribution enough. 

Obi-Wan, however, seemed to feel differently. Just as they were leaving the registry office, he called, “wait!” And ran up to the couple to whisper something to them both. When he was done, Vryka pulled her fist back and punched him in the face. 

Mace felt his hand drift to where the hilt of his lightsaber should have been, but already Obi-Wan was standing, wiping away a trace of blood and clapping Catapult hard on the back, sending the happy couple firmly on their way. 

“What did you tell them?” Cody asked, eyes crinkling with amusement as he handed their partner a handkerchief. 

“Like I told Wolffe. Mandalorian marriage tradition is that you marry your allies. Someone who fights at your side. It’s good luck to win a fight on your wedding day. They used to stage them even if the couple weren’t warriors. I told them that, and I told her to hit me. Given the cultural context, I imagine winning a fight against a Jedi is very good luck.”

The surge of love Mace felt for this strange, stupid, wonderful man was powerful indeed. Judging by the look on Cody’s face, he felt much the same.

\--

The Skywalker twins quietly turned one amid the general chaos of the temple. It was the anniversary of a thousand things, most of them terrible, as well as being two weeks after the passing of the first wave of Demilitarization Acts, creating opportunities for the Vode to settle on a number of worlds, and shifting those who didn’t want to settle into a new version of the Corps, focused primarily on rebuilding projects. The temple population now hovered steadily around a hundred, with new initiates, returning Jedi – Mace was pleasantly surprised to have been right about T’ra Saa – and various non-Jedi, including Cody, Padmé, and the twins. 

“I thought,” Padmé admitted, as they watched Luke flinging mashed peas across the room with surprising velocity, “that I might change their birthdays to their actual due date, before Palpatine’s meddling. But that feels dishonest, somehow. They were born in the Fall. It’s something they’re going to have to live with whether I want that for them or not.”

“Keep it,” Mace told her, surprised by how strongly he felt on the issue. “It’s the one spark of brightness in all of this.”

Anakin entered just then, with Leia balanced on his hip, right where a lightsaber might have hung. Except for the fact that Skywalker hadn’t carried one for a year, now. As long, in fact, as Mace himself had gone without. Smiling at Padmé, he came to sit with them.

Padmé, looking at her husband with just as much affection as he offered her, said, “actually, I think there’s a lot of brightness in this.”

Luke, with stunning accuracy, hit his father right in the face with a fistful of peas. 

\--

The Chancellor finished her speech, about how everyone in the Senate shared culpability for giving Palpatine power, and stood back so Bail – Vice Chancellor Organa – could introduce the next speaker. 

“Now,” he said, as Mace could feel his heart fluttering nervously, “I will hand over your time to Jedi Master Mace Windu. Master Windu is the Master of the Order, and a year ago, he was the only survivor of the group of Jedi who attempted to peacefully arrest Chancellor Palpatine before he could commence his systematic murder of their Order. Master Windu is also the Jedi Representative to the Senate, and I am honoured to be able to call him a personal friend. I do not tell you lightly that I believe it was his wisdom, and his unerring dedication to hope that our future can be better than our present, that saved this Republic. Master Windu.”

Obi-Wan should have done this, Mace thought, as the eyes of the Galaxy turned to him. He was keenly aware that his voice would be broadcast over every world the signal could reach, which constituted nearly all of them. This was his best chance to convince any Jedi and Vode stragglers who still existed that they were safe to come home. It was a duty he could not take lightly. Even now, all these months later, there had been no definite report on Depa’s death. It seemed far too important a task to trust to himself. And yet he was their leader, now perhaps more than he had ever been, and Obi-Wan trusted him to do this. 

He could feel his partner in the Force, seated far above him with Padmé in her booth. Since Representative Binks had seen fit to make an appearance as well, Mace thought that Obi-Wan had the worse lot of the two of them. Sensing Mace’s presence watching him, Obi-Wan sent him a burst of calm, of certainty that Mace would do well. Luminara, who was the only other Jedi there in person, was much more evidently nervous than Obi-Wan. Her feelings on the matter mirrored Mace’s own. 

“A year and a tenday ago,” Mace said, voice rough and awkward to his own ears, “I was falling from the Chancellor’s office, feeling my own death a certainty. In the last seconds before I lost consciousness, from the severe wounds I had taken, I caught myself by smashing through the windshield of a passing speeder. In that moment I felt the greatest pain I have ever felt. It did not come from the broken windshield cutting into my skin, nor from the screams of the driver on my ears, nor from the aching pain of my severed limbs.

“If you are not a Jedi, or never spent much time with us, it is very likely you have no concept of the degree to which all Jedi were – and remain – connected. Like families all across the Galaxy, we are raised together. We are raised by our own kind, tended to by them. There is a connection innate to this. But we also have something else. We are connected in a way unique to us. The force, that which gives Jedi our unique gifts, is that most fundamental building block of the universe. It binds all things, and us more so than most. Even now, I can feel stretching into the stars my connections to my people. There were once thousands of them, bright to my sight as any star might be to yours. In that moment, while I lay still, convinced I was dying, I felt almost all of those stars go out. I felt the people I had loved, who I had raised and who had raised me, die. I felt the deaths of the children of my people. It is an incalculable violence. In as much as I pray for anything, I pray it is never again visited upon another living being.

“Yet when tasked with writing this speech, the description of that violence seemed somehow inadequate, to my ears. Perhaps it is because life is not all that was lost that day. So I went, and spoke to my fellows, and here is instead that which they told me had been lost: Memory and history, the knowledge of who we were. Potential, the ability to shape our futures as we see fit. Hope, the belief that tomorrow might be better than today. Faith. Innocence. Integrity. Starlight. All these are things Jedi survivors have told me that they felt lost, that day. But it was a non-Jedi, Senator Amidala of Naboo, who finally put into words that which I had been searching for. She told me: that day, we lost trust. We lost our ability to trust in each other, because we knew that Palpatine could manipulate or control any one of us. But we also lost our trust in ourselves, for we had been so resolutely deceived, and at such high cost, that we would never again trust ourselves. We could not trust ourselves to do what was right, to protect the Galaxy and to honour the people we loved.

“And this is the violence that sticks with me. Because this was not only inflicted on the Jedi. It was not only inflicted on the Vode, whose suffering is so closely woven with ours that they may never be untangled. It was inflicted on all of us. But that is our past. It is the scars upon our skin. It is not our future. Palpatine would have liked nothing more than to control our destinies, to see us divided, unable to trust in each other, paralyzed by self doubt. But he will not see it. It shall not happen. We will place trust in each other again, even where we have been burned. I will again place my trust in the Senate, in the hope and the belief that it will fight to do better today than yesterday. I will again place my trust in the Vode, and I hope that, in spite of everything, of the myriad ways we failed to protect you all, from the Sith who was so much more than any of us ever could have imagine, you will again place your trust in the Jedi. In our ability to fight, to be better tomorrow than today. On this, the first of many painful anniversaries, this is what I ask from all of you. To trust each other, to fight against the painful legacies Palpatine left us with, and to go on in peace. As we say here on Coruscant: sometimes the only way out is upwards. Thank you.” 

The applause was deafening, but only Obi-Wan’s pride in the corner of his mind and Cody’s hand on his shoulder as he returned to his seat mattered. 

\--

Mace’s speech, along with Cody’s, which followed on the same day, had… effects. Possibly more so than either had anticipated. The first was the return of a young Twi’lek Padawan by the name of Bylla Orten, to the temple. She was fourteen, and she’d been separated from her master in the chaos of the Fall. 

“She was very, very lucky,” Wolffe said, quietly. He’d been sitting on the other side of the room with Mace, watching Quinlan and Bylla speak to each other. “If they’d thought to sell her to the Hutts instead of ransoming her to us… if they hadn’t heard your broadcast…” 

“Do you ever just want to destroy something?” Mace did. It was part of what he’d founded his art of Vaapad on. His control over it, and his shifting perceptions of the universe around him, were what made him a Jedi. 

“All the time,” Wolffe murmured, voice low and terrible. “I want to just… run away and take my blaster and destroy something. I want to leave everything and go and not care if I live or die. But I don’t think Plo would want that for me.”

Mace felt profoundly sad. “Do you really feel like that all the time?”

“No,” he admitted. “Not all the time. It’s always there, in the back of my mind. But I feel calm, now, often. I love my work. I love my vode. I feel it now, when I think of what very nearly happened to that girl. I just want… answers. I don’t want to rest until we have a confirmed death or present location for every single Jedi. In some ways, I’m glad that I had to watch Plo fall. That I had to go retrieve his body. At least I know. I hate not knowing. And at least I could say goodbye on my own terms.” He gave Mace a sympathetic look. “She’s still unaccounted for, right? Your kid.”

In some ways, Depa would always be his kid. No master, he thought, should outlive their padawans. “I know she’s gone, but… there’s knowing, and there’s knowing.” 

Bylla laughed brightly, and Quinlan smiled at her. She looked nothing like Aayla, really. Different complexions, different eyes, different styles, even. But there was still a certain significance there. He hoped Quinlan knew what he was doing.

“What would you think if I assembled a recon team? We have the last known locations of every Jedi. If you gave us one, to come as a representative – someone established, Master Saa, maybe, or Obi-Wan – we could check. See what we can find. I can think of at least fifty Vode who would want to do this. It would give us all a sense of relief to know what became of our brothers.”

Quinlan, obviously in the middle of telling an animated story, made a strange face. Bylla laughed again, with a brightness probably undeserved by Quinlan. He wasn’t actually very funny, most of the time.

“I think that would be brilliant. And ask any Jedi you like, but I recommend Luminara. I think she finds being here in the temple overwhelming.” 

They’d all lost padawans, but Luminara and Shaak’s had been children, still. It was more painful for them to remember that only days before he died, Shaak’s padawan had been hugging her goodbye as she left for Kashyyyk. To remember that Luminara had gone to visit Barriss Offee in prison at every opportunity, until the day the girl had been killed there, defenceless and alone. There was a reason Shaak was on Kamino, all these months later. Luminara had been brave about her grief, but her bravery was unnecessary. She was free to leave.

Wolffe gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to her. You do a good job of looking after them, you know.”

Mace ducked his head. “I try to. But really, they all look after each other.”

Quinlan had come running the second he’d heard there was a traumatized padawan involved. He was better with children, and better at post-trauma interviewing, which was technically what this was, than Mace. He would look after Bylla, now. Mace was certain. The force sang in the way it always did, when people were destined for each other, when the potential for an apprenticeship bond was strongest. Mace could see the thousand possibilities for ways this could go wrong, and the millions of ways it could go right.

“I know. You’re the reason why they do, though. You lead by example.”

Maybe. He liked to hope it was true. “You and me, Wolffe. Fox and Cody. Padmé and Jocasta and the Organas and Obi-Wan. Anakin, in spite of everything or maybe because it. Force, I’ll give credit to Catapult. I have no idea what he’s doing half the time, but it works.”

Wolffe cracked a smile at that. “I think we’re building something extraordinary, you know. It won’t be finished in my lifetime, or yours, but it will be marvellous.”

It would, at that. 

\--

After Quinlan took Bylla as his apprentice, the itch started, at the back of Mace’s mind. The force was telling him that somewhere in the Galaxy, there was a child he was supposed to be training. It had a tendency to guide people together in this way, whether or not they were conscious of it. Obi-Wan and Anakin were a testament to the way it could happen without either party being aware of it. This was why so many Jedi ended up being trained by the searchers who first found them. But now, Mace felt it, and he couldn’t exactly put his finger on where he was supposed to go, or who he was looking for. It was completely maddening. 

All of them were going to have to take padawans eventually, whether they wanted to or not. There were too few Jedi to do anything else. Even Ahsoka, who’d formally left the Order, seemed to have a sense of it. Mace had caught her watching the younger children, with a look on her face. Mace knew that look. She’d never technically been knighted, but, well, Mace had faith in her to do what was right, and the offer was on the table if she ever changed her mind. He could see the same certainty in Obi-Wan as well, although he hadn’t seen who it was directed at, yet. Jocasta, with her usual correctness, had simply announced one day that one of the initiates, currently nine, would be her padawan some day, because he had an interest in the archives and was thus well-suited. The only Jedi would hadn’t shown the impulse, to some degree, were Shaak and Luminara. They’d been too recently burned. 

Mace thought about going on Search, looking for the child his mind was directing him to. But it seemed wrong, somehow. The force called to him to stay at Coruscant, and since that was where his duty was, where those he loved were, Mace was not going to dispute it. 

In the end, the solution came to him, standing in the entrance hall with Luminara in all her glory at one side, and Depa’s Commander – Grey, wasn’t it? He looked like he’d aged a thousand years in one – at the other. Caleb Dume. Mace suddenly and blindingly felt a fool. Depa had been gone. He had felt that much instantly. But how had he never thought to ask? Depa surely would have protected the boy with her every breath, and she had been very, very good at what she did. 

“Master Windu.”

And he could see a thousand futures, radiating from this child, some of them already hanging severed, paths that could never now be followed. Futures that never now could occur where he was raised by Depa. Futures that never now would occur where the Order was left shattered, where nobody survived to help this boy. Mace reached through the tangled web of destiny, as was his wont, and selected a fistful of the brightest threads, the most hopeful and happiest. With rather more power than he spent on anything these days, he thought, (it will be one of these.)

“Caleb,” he said, “I am very happy to see you.”

\--

EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER. RYLOTH. 

“He’s beautiful, Hera.” Cody was always odd around very young children. After all, the way he’d grown up, there’d never been any awkward, swaddled newborns like Jacen was. 

“He gets it all from me, naturally,” she said, which got an offended look from Caleb. In truth, Jacen looked much more like him than like her, with an almost-human appearance.

“That’s probably for the best,” Obi-Wan said, mildly. Caleb upgraded from offended looks to rude hand-gestures. 

“He gets that from you,” Mace informed Obi-Wan, mostly so he could get an offended look all of his own. 

“Thank you,” Hera said rather loudly, to get them back on track, “for coming all the way from Coruscant.”

It had been something of a surprise to Mace and Cham both, when their children had fallen in love. They were old friends, after all, since the war, and Cham’s election to the Senate had been one of the best political developments in the galaxy, as far as Mace and Cody’s work was concerned. But there was a far step between that and being in-laws. Yet here they were. In-laws, complete with grandchild. There must have been something about young Jedi and brilliant politicians, Mace decided. Obi-Wan and Satine, Anakin and Padmé, Caleb and Hera, Ahsoka and Riyo. Himself, Obi-Wan and Cody. Maybe it was just their lineage, Mace decided. He had a vague memory of one of Qui-Gon’s padawan-brothers running off for reasons that had something to do with a monarch. 

“There was really no other choice,” Obi-Wan said, mildly. “Luke would have gone on strike if I’d made him miss a chance to see Ezra. As you well know.”

When the Skywalker twins had met Caleb’s padawan, five years earlier, they’d immediately adopted him as one of their own, since he shared their misfortune of having been born on the Day of Shadows. Whenever they were together, in any combination, they were always inseparable. It was harder, now that Leia had dropped out of Jedi training in favour of the Senate and her mother’s path, but they still found as much time as they possibly could. Mace thought the whole thing was rather sweet. He’d never had a close friend like that at their age. Few Jedi of his generation had. 

Cody elbowed their partner in the ribs. “Don’t listen to him, Hera, Caleb. We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Congratulations to both of you – although especially the one of you who did all the real work, Hera – we’re very happy, and very proud.”

“You’re my favourite,” she said. “Here. You get the grandchild first.” 

This time, watching his partner hold a sleeping infant and stare with wonder at the tiny life in his hands, Mace really did manage to take a picture.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fin! Next week, I’ll be back posting Luminous Objects, my Jedi!Dooku fic, which you should totally check out even though Mace isn’t nearly as good in it. Or comment on this fic and chat with me!!! I always love to hear from people.
> 
> Notes on Canon: T’ra Saa is Mace’s legends canon master but not in the EU. I still wanted them to know each other tho because fuck it. Cham Syndulla and Mace actually are canonically friends so having their kids get together was probably weird and wonderful for them. Luminara Unduli and Quinlan Vos really do both survive 66 on Kashyyyk, which makes you wonder why Yoda didn’t like… wait 20 fucking minutes and bring some backup.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate title: Bail Organa teaches Macaroni Crafts to Baby Jedi. 
> 
> No I have no idea who of the Organa-Skywalker-Amidala polycule is together. I’m not sure they know either. But they’re all coparenting for the next 18 years so they’d better get used to it! Luke and Leia are going to have a /very/ big family. 
> 
> Also *handwaves technology and how the force works* don’t worry about it.
> 
> Pt. 2 next week! I have a lot of thoughts about this fic so plz talk to me.


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